In the US, in common speech, the word “Asian” has tended to mean East or Southeast Asian. In the UK, the same word more often refers to the Indian subcontinent. Look, I don’t decide these things. It has to do with historic patterns of migration: who went where. It is also liable to change. But it shows that America’s exposure to the world’s largest continent is nothing like Britain’s.
That is the least of the differences. The forebears of a Black Briton probably arrived in the country after 1945, willingly. Those of a Black American might have come centuries ago, forcibly. In America, the settlers’ treatment of people who were already there is recent enough to be a raw topic. As harsh as the Emperor Claudius no doubt was, the displacement of “native” Britons has lost some of its salience over the intervening millennia.
“Woke”, if that means a focus on group identities, has turned out to be a bad fit in the US. But at least it was dreamt up with the US in mind. What possessed people in Britain to think it made sense in their different (which isn’t to say better) context? Or in Europe’s? I’d toast the apparent demise of this dogma but even the crusade against it in Britain has a US flavour — faintly religious, very online — which will unnerve the public in no time.
There is but one consolation in what Donald Trump has done of late. Strategically, the transatlantic rift is a disaster. Culturally, it might not be the worst thing if America and Europe have a bit less to do with each other. Their educated elites in particular should start seeing other people.
Looking back, the relationship was at its healthiest in the cold war, when the political enmeshment was almost airtight but there was much less pretence of sameness
The undue obsession isn’t all one way. How did JD Vance become so exercised about free speech in Britain that he raised it in a televised Oval Office setting? If we fall short of First Amendment standards, that is because we don’t have a First Amendment, because we are a different country. As with Elon Musk’s dabblings in Germany, the conceit here — born of the internet, I think — is that the north Atlantic is a common cultural space.
Still, the fault lies mostly with Europe. The US is not “culturally imperialist”. It has CNN but no public mission to shape world news, at least not one to match the BBC, France 24, Deutsche Welle and Al Jazeera. It has no Melville Institute to go against those named after Goethe and Cervantes. Its grip on film, academia and postwar painting was never a conscious, top-down project, even if the CIA was more of a cultural actor in the cold war than was known at the time.
No, it is a European choice to live vicariously through America. (Not just a British one, unless I am misremembering those George Floyd protests in France.) I myself am always setting the continent’s feeble economic growth rate against America’s, as though it were the natural comparator. Given their respective ages and histories, is it? Even if Europe is the Norma Desmond of continents, drunk on the past, how could it not be?
Looking back, the relationship was at its healthiest in the cold war, when the political enmeshment was almost airtight but there was much less pretence of cultural sameness. A staple of 20th-century Toryism was mild distaste for the US, which often informed a corresponding fancy for the European project. (Jeremy Clarkson, a subtler conservative than his schtick implies, is an echo of that world.) This sentiment crossed over at times into witless anti-Americanism. But it helped to inoculate the continent against laughably out-of-context ideas and practices. As a child in the height of the Atlantic bond, I never heard “upspeak”, that tic by which grown men and women in modern Britain adopt the vocal cadence of 13-year-olds in Pasadena. What we have lived through is the inverse of the cold war: political estrangement alongside deepening cultural mimicry.
Perhaps the Trump shock will bring a cooling off on all fronts. Last weekend, in a startling speech as Canada’s Liberal leader, Mark Carney cast the US as Other, in its approach to language and the absorption of immigrants and other cultural fundamentals. Whether to regret his belligerence, or wish our prime minister would say the same, it is hard in these times to know.
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